PREACHED AT THE CONSECRATION OF
THE RT. REV. ALEXANDER HAMIL-
TON VINTON, D.D., AS BISHOP OF
WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS

BY THE

Rt. Rev. Henry Codman Potter, D.D.

BISHOP OF NEW YORK

ALL SAINTS' CHURCH, WORCESTER

April 22nd, 1902

Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as My Father
hath sent Me, even so send I you. And when He had said this,
He breathed on them, and said unto them, Receive ye the Holy
Ghost.

St. John xx, 21-22.

ST. LUKE'S account of this incident discloses the fact that
the eleven disciples were at supper, and that others of the little
Christian fellowship were with them. It must have been a moment
of supreme perplexity, and that for a reason that does not lie,
at first, upon the surface. Jesus was risen, some said, Mary
and the rest. But, was He risen, and if He was, what then?
Plainly, something tremendous had happened; and, no less plainly,
if it had, their relation to their Leader was somehow immeasurably
altered. What were they to do? How were they to work? Who was
henceforth to lead them? And then He comes suddenly, mysteriously,
silently, but with all the old and infinite tenderness and thoughtfulness
for them. "He stood in the midst of them," [3/4]
and straightway calms and steadies them. "Peace be unto
you." He shows them His hands and His side, and then, when
terror and perplexity have suddenly been transfigured into ecstasy,
with equal tenderness and wisdom He calms the ecstasy; and then
He gives them their commission. It is with one particular note
of it that I desire to concern myself, this morning. Jesus does
not merely say, "Steady yourselves, My children: be calm,
and take up your great task. The world waits for your message.
The time at last is ripe, the hour has struck; the nations are
expectant. To a waiting world I send you!" All that, in
one way or another, by parable, miracle and prediction, He had
already said. But now there is something more. It is not merely
"Go, I am sending you." Now it is, As My Father hath
sent Me, even so send I you."

It is impossible, here, to ignore the force of that tremendous
"even so." If I am reminded, at this point,
that such [4/5] force and significance as it might otherwise
carry are qualified by the fact that the two terms in the Greek
that stand for the words "sent" and "send"
are not the same, I would make haste to say that I do not forget
it. Jesus says, "As My Father hath sent Me"--apestalken me; and then not apostellw
umaV, but pempw umaV. But is
not this simply to recognize the fact that apostellw,
from which 'apostle' and 'apostolate' are derived, refers to
a mission with a definite commission, or rather for a definite
purpose," as Edersheim has so clearly shown, "while
pempw is sending in a general sense"?
[The Life and Times of Jesus, Vol. II, p. 614.] And above all
must we not remember that both are elsewhere used, and used alike,
of Christ and the disciples? And therefore this mere verbal difference
cannot destroy what I have called the tremendous significance
here of the form of Christ's words. To a handful of men who have
as yet grasped but dimly their relation to himself, and even
less [5/6] clearly the work to which they are called, Jesus here
announces its oneness with His own. That work of His, He bids
them understand, is so far as yet from being accomplished that
it is only just begun. He speaks of "His mission,"
as the late great Bishop of Durham has with such rare learning
and exquisite insight pointed out, "as present, not past;
as continuing, not as concluded. [Westcott, The Revelation of
the Risen Lord, pp. 84-85.] He says: 'As My Father hath sent
Me,' and not merely 'As My Father sent Me.' He declares,
that is, that His work is not over, though the manner in which
it is done is changed. Henceforth He is and He acts in those
whom He has chosen. They are in Him sharing the fullness of His
power; He is in them sharing in the burden of their labors."'

And then the highest significance of this incomparable truth
is at once illustrated and emphasized by the act with [6/7] which
its enunciation is accompanied. "And when He had said this
He breathed on them and said, 'Receive ye the Holy Ghost.'"

It is thus, men and brethren, that matchless words and matchless
act reach down among the foundations. And to recognize what foundations
they are which they touch, let us leave, for a moment, that ecclesiastical
realm with which, naturally enough, our thoughts at this time
may appropriately be occupied, and step forth for a little to
that wider realm which is outside of it. If you were asked to
designate or, to be more specific, by a single phrase to describe
the conspicuous characteristic of our modern life, how would
you describe it? I think there will be little difference of opinion
if I say that the answer to such a question would be, "By
the note of organization." Other ages and other civilizations
have had their distinctive characteristic--monadic, pastoral,
war-like, artistic, or what not; but it has [7/8] remained for
these times and for modern thought and energy to express themselves
mainly and most distinctively by forces and mechanisms that are
organized. Just as machinery has, in such countless instances,
taken the place of hand-labor, and just as the man behind the
machine has in so many other instances been reduced step by step
below the grade of a sentient creature, to be often little more
than a mere cog in the great and multiform mechanism of the world,
so it is coming to be, more and more, with all that which, on
the higher planes of being and action, stands substantially for
machinery. We are narrowing all the time, e. g., the range of
professional training and experience; and as the old family doctor
has almost entirely disappeared under those conditions of the
modern hospital, which more and more classify human ailments
and mechanicalize the methods by which they are dealt with, so
is it all the way along, until we come to the modern church [8/9]
and its machinery, and the modern ministry of whatever order,
and those auxiliaries which in so many forms are supposed to
be indispensable to it.

Well; let us own, frankly, that in one sense they are. The
complexity of modern life cannot arrest itself, arbitrarily,
at some purely arbitrary point, and insist that it will go no
further. If the Church is to exist at all, it must exist as a
real and visible mechanism; and not as a mere ghost in the world.
No profounder philosophy was ever uttered than that homely aphorism
which long ago declared that "we must not let the devil
have all the good tunes;" and what at the bottom does it
mean but that Christ and His Kingdom are here in the world to
claim all honest and innocent things by a divine touch, and then
to consecrate them to a divine use? That splendid argument of
the great Apostle, in the first Epistle to the Corinthians concerning
meats, and drinks, and holy days, and the rest, to [9/10] which
so long the world, and especially (forgive me, brethren, that
I must say it here), Puritan New England, has been blind,
for what does it stand but this--that the office of Religion
in the world is to redeem and disenthrall,--not alone man, but
the things which man, by misuse and a blind superstition, has
perverted and degraded? And so, do I look at an army with its
cavalry, infantry and artillery and the rest, and say, "How
splendid and how potent that is!"--do I look at a factory,
with its myriad wheels and marvelous precision of production
and say, "How superb and creative that is!"--do I watch
the giant progress of that larger mechanism that covers a continent
with iron rails and sends its never-resting trains flying hither
and thither, with the swift and untiring precision of the weaver's
shuttle, and cry out, How magnificent and all-inclusive that
is,--so must society be organized and correlated,--nay, so must
the forces of the Church of God be marshaled and [10/11] mutually
adjusted for their most august tasks."--Such a cry is wise
and timely. Nothing is more ghastly in some aspects of it, than
the enormous waste of religious force in our generation simply
because, for reasons and from motives which I shall not venture,
here, to characterize, the children of light elect to furnish
a daily demonstration, in this connection, of the words of Jesus
that wiser than they are the children of this world.

We have seen, it is true, in the present generation a wide
and significant though tardy recognition of this fact. Not often
has any younger clergyman to whom I am speaking this morning
shown an older one, for instance, a modern parish-house, without
being told by the latter that, in his day, the ministry had to
do its work without any helps and mechanisms of that sort; nor
has the elder always refrained from the modest intimation that
they did not always do it so badly, either. For one, I am sure
they did not; but [11/12] neither you nor I can doubt that, with
modern methods and mechanisms, they might have done it better.
It is idle to deny, however much we may be fond of saying "the
old is better," that, in towns and villages all over the
land, the Church is touching more lives, and touching them in
more quickening and ennobling ways, than in this land she has
ever done before. A divine of my acquaintance, referring to the
institutional work, in a great city, of a parish very unlike
his own (which, outside of maintaining its own services, was
doing no work at all), remarked loftily that that was not doing
the work of the Catholic Church, but pure humanitarianism,"
which prompted some one coarsely but conclusively to reply that
"as it was the kind of work that Jesus did, apparently Jesus,
who was supposed to be the Founder of the Catholic Church, didn't
know His own business!" Plainly, it must be owned that the
modern Institutional Church, as it has been called, [12/13] in
reaching out to man through many avenues of contact, and, in
recognizing the whole man as divine in his origin and therefore
a redeemable quantity, has been doing high and wise work.

But, no less plainly, it is work of a kind the value of which
may easily be exaggerated. Even if it were not true that in such
work there is a constant tendency to worship the net and the
drag--to say, "Look on those great buildings which we have
builded--these libraries, and reading-rooms, and club-rooms,
and the rest; "--there is, at any rate, as I fear it must
be owned, a tendency to regard the work that is done in and through
these various mechanisms as making up the larger part
of the work of the Christian ministry; and certainly there is
much food for grave thought in the fact that, coincidently with
that remarkable growth in institutional work in the modern Church
of which I have spoken, it is not claimed, I believe, that there
has been any [13/14] corresponding growth, or, indeed, any growth
at all, in the vigor, grasp, or sovereignty of the pulpit; nay,
rather, that in many minds the decay of this latter has been
supposed to be somehow atoned for by the development of the former.

The question is too large for discussion here, and I have
raised it only because it is closely cognate to that other and,
in connection with the service of this day, more imminent question,
"What is the true office and calling of the Episcopate?"
To that question there is one usual answer, as to the force and
pertinency of which, I freely own, there is no question.

"A bishop," it is said, must be a man of administrative
aptitudes; by which, I suppose, is meant a man who has had various
training in the smaller diocese (dioikhsiV,
housekeeping) of a parish; who has learned how to rule; how to
be just; how to be patient; how to hear both sides; how to efface
himself; how to forecast, and largely and wisely plan; and all
[14/15] the rest which is indispensable to good government anywhere,
whether it is in a nursery or on a throne. A bishop, too, we
are told, must be a leader, whether as a missionary in waste
places, or a founder and builder of schools, hospitals, and the
rest, in great centres. And a bishop, it is still further said,
must be a man of affairs, and have his place and hold his place
in the larger life of that world which is outside of parish boundaries
or Episcopal routine."

Yes, undoubtedly, all this is true enough, and truth which
on such occasion we may wisely remember. And as a consequence
of its wider and more cordial recognition, it is undoubtedly
true, also, that the modern bishop is a very different personage
from his predecessors. Time was, as it has been said, that "if
a bishop in England had ridden in an omnibus it would have been
regarded as a gross indecorum, if not an indecency; and the time
might come," it has been added, "when if he [15/16]
rode in anything else it would almost create a public scandal."
Exaggerated as is the sarcasm, it is the shell of a revolution
of sentiment of which we must all be conscious in both hemispheres.
The modern ministry, whether of the Episcopate or any other order,
is expected to be a rather handy, quite informal, and almost
altogether secular mechanism which we may put to almost any task
with equal fit ness, and from which, in all alike, we expect
little more than good business aptitudes, and a faculty for energizing
ecclesiastical affairs along what we are wont to call "practical"
lines.

It would be an interesting, and I apprehend a somewhat startling,
task to take such a conception of a bishop's office and put it
alongside of those portraitures of it which we find in the pages
of the New Testament. There is no smallest doubt that there and
then, as now, it was expected of the Episcopate that it should
discharge an administrative office in the [16/17] Church. "And
the rest," says the Apostle in a certain place, "will
I set in order when I come;" [1 Cor. ii, 34.] and when we
turn to see what he means by such a phrase, we find that they
are questions of methods of worship with which he is dealing,
and especially those arising in the Church of Corinth, in connection
with the Celebration of the Holy Communion. Plainly enough, these
questions, and others like them, in which local tradition and
local partisanship were involved, were destined almost inevitably,
at the first, to divide those of different races, and originally
of different religious beliefs; and no less plainly it was the
duty of one who both by his office and his gifts stood in a sense
outside of and above them, to deal with them in that explicit
and authoritative way in which, as a matter of fact, St. Paul
did deal with them.

But when you have collated all the passages in the Apostolic
history which raise [17/18] such issues and discuss them or rule
upon them, it is impossible not to recognize that the men who
laid the foundations of the Church in the world were concerned
with other and much larger questions than those of mere ecclesiastical
mechanism or ceremonial order. No man can read the Epistle to
the Romans or the Galatians, or those discourses of St. Paul
preserved for us in the book of the Acts of the Apostles, without
recognizing that however local or comparatively insignificant
the question with which he has to deal, circumcision, forbidden
meats, sacred days, and the rest, he is forever lifting the discussion
of them into a realm where they were but introductory to the
declaration of great principles and the foreshadowing of a divine
and inspired policy; in other words, that the Apostolate was
most of all great and mighty, not for its definitions, or for
its defense of mechanisms, but for its enunciation of pre-eminent
and enduring principles.

[19] I believe it to be no less the office of the Episcopate
to-day. It is sometimes said of the clerical mind that it has
no sense of proportion; that it cannot distinguish between great
and small, and that, in dealing with questions that challenge
its interest and its action, it is as likely to be engrossed
with the mint and anise of an issue as to discover the essential
truth or falsehood which lies at the bottom of it. I do not undertake
to say that the imputation is just; but I am here, if I have
any business here at all, to maintain that such is not the office
of a Bishop. He is often faulted because he will not concern
himself with controversies which, at one time or another, have
threatened to rend the Church in twain, and concerning which
he has, we say complainingly, no word to speak. Well, when we
have gotten tired, brethren, of saying that he does not speak
because he does not dare to, it may some day dawn upon us that
he does not speak because the question is really not large [19/20]
enough to make it worth while for him to concern himself with
it.

Your neighbor in the next parish uses wafer bread, does he,
my reverend brother, and you have gone to your bishop to insist
that he shall discipline him; and the bishop is--well, quiescent
and inert, and you are going to denounce him as a traitor to
the Protestant religion. Well, do so if it will make you any
happier and relieve your scruple of conscience. But one of these
days it is just possible that it may dawn upon you that your
bishop is passing sleepless nights and perplexed though prayerful
days because, looking at the Church and our modern life with
a little wider outlook than yours, he sees perils that you have
never dreamed of--and that are much graver than the use or non-use
of wafer bread; that his breast is aching over problems that
you have never recognized at all, and that his soul is agonized
with fears for the hold of God on the [20/21] heart and faith
of man which you, my brother, have never dreamed!

Ah, no! no! It is not merely business energy, nor administrative
ability, nor even pulpit power that we want in the Episcopate.
It is not alone the paternal temper and the sympathetic word
in its Bishops that our times are waiting for. Somewhere, somehow,
at some time or other these men must, like him of whom the prophet
Isaiah tells us--when the burden of Dumah was heard and one called,
"out of Seir, Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what
of the night?"--be able to answer out of whatever thick
darkness envelopes the Church and the world in some hour of supreme
danger and supreme uncertainty, with that other watchman of the
olden time, "The morning cometh"--yes, most surely
cometh in God's own time and way--even though "the night
cometh also." [Isaiah xxi, II, 12.]

In other words, men and brethren, an [21/22] Episcopate of
true power must be an Episcopate of vision! Through the sophistries
of the moment, through the fallacies alike of superstition and
fanaticism, the Bishop's must be an eye that penetrates beneath
them all to those great and unchanging truths that underlie them
all! Nothing is more tragic in religious history, in this connection,
than the way in which the re-adjustment of men's points of view
from time to time all the way along in the progress of the Church,
has seemed to threaten foundations, which such a readjustment
has at last disclosed to be only more sure and stable. That quality
of discrimination the absence of which is closely allied with
that other absence of a sense of proportion, to which I have
already referred, has more than once menaced the Church more
gravely from within than error or enmity has menaced it without.
And it is precisely at this point [22/23] I believe, that a greater,
if not the greatest, office of the Episcopate is to find its
sphere. Its calling it is, supremely, in all the questions with
which it is called to deal, to strive to see the whole rather
than a fragment. Its office is forever to purge its vision from
inherited opinions, from local traditions, and most of all from
personal prejudice. And that it may do this, its office it is
most of all to remember how, when Jesus commissioned His first
bishops, He breathed on them and said, "Receive ye the
Holy Ghost!" To that mightiest and ever-present ministry,
the ministry of the Holy Ghost, the Bishop, before all men, as
I believe, is set to witness. He must take his questions first
to the Standing Committee, if you please--when he can get them
to advise him, which some of us are not always able to persuade
them to do! But when he has gotten through with them he must
take his questions up to a much higher court than that, and on
his knees cry out for [23/24] help, and in the still hours wait
and brood and watch for light!

Alas, that, to all this, the whole constitution of our modern
life is so unfriendly and so increasingly unfriendly! Its demands
are not less upon the Episcopate, but from day to day increasingly
more urgent and exacting. And so, my brethren of this new diocese,
I plead for him. who is to be your Bishop. Do not expect or exact
of him too much! Do not be guilty of the crass stupidity of complaining
that he is overlooking Diocesan claims, if sometimes he recognizes
and owns, those larger claims that lie beyond them. Do not suppose
that because he is not always on the road, but rather sometimes,
in his study, waiting there for light from books, from men, and
most of all from the Holy Ghost, he is not doing Episcopal work.
In an age which waits most of all, I think, for the man of courage
and the man of vision, you must at least give him time: to brace
the one and to purge the other!

[24] And to you, my brother, called to large and difficult
and often solitary tasks, let me offer the loving salutations
and the brotherly sympathy of those whose office you are soon
to share. You come to it, they cannot but remember, bearing a
great name and enduringly associated in the history of the Church
with ministries of rare power.--Massachusetts will never forget
Alexander Hamilton Vinton, as New York will never forget his
brother Francis. One of them made the pulpit of Trinity Church,
New York, to ring in troublous times with dauntless and enkindling
tones, and the other helped to train for the pulpit of Trinity
Church, Boston, the preacher, first, and prelate, later, whose
fame has girdled the world. Nay, more, yourself a soldier's son,
you come to your high tasks, I am persuaded, resolved to discharge
them with unswerving loyalty to God and His Church and with unshrinking
fidelity to your fellow men. To you and the Clergy and Laity,
who are to be yours, [25/26] is given a unique and most interesting
work. The Diocese and you and they begin that work together.
It has the charm of that freedom which comes with opportunities
largely new, and if it have also those difficulties that come
from problems yet untried, you have in the mother who bore you,
that older Massachusetts out of whose loins you came, in her
Bishop, her Clergy and her people, whose generous interest already
shown to you, is pledge of an affection that will not die--in
these you have, I say, the earnest of wise counsels and watchful
solicitude. Go, then, to your tasks, but not with these alone.
"And when Jesus had spoken unto them, 'Peace be unto you,'
he breathed on them and said, 'Receive ye the Holy Ghost.' "Fountain
of Life and Strength divine, descend on this our brother, and
abide with him forever!"